Plan the principal hall as a long rectangle entered on its short side through a porch with two columns between the side walls and a vestibule, and put a great round hearth in the centre of the hall, ringed by four columns carrying a raised roof.
The great dead outside the walls, by the roads
Dig the tholos tombs of later rulers into the hillsides outside the walls, along the roads that approach the city, each entered by a long open passage.
Pausanias was shown, inside the ruins, the graves of Atreus and of Agamemnon and those murdered with him; Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, he was told, were buried a little way outside the wall, as unworthy to lie within it where Agamemnon lay. The archaeology tells a different story (the shaft graves inside the gate are three centuries older than the legendary kings), but the pattern he describes is real: nine great tholos tombs lie outside the citadel, cut into the slopes beside the roads, the finest of them the so-called Treasury of Atreus.
Related rules
Wall the whole hill; put the ruler’s megaron on its summit, reached by a ramp from the main gate; keep stores, shrines and the ancestral graves inside the walls, and bring water within reach by a hidden stair.
Set the main gate back in a narrow court between the wall and a projecting bastion placed on the right hand of those who approach, so that an enemy at the gate has his unshielded side to the defenders.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The great dead outside the walls, by the roads”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/tombs-outside-walls. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.